Recent publications made by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks have fueled an emotionally charged debate about the secrecy of government information and the people's right to know. This debate has turned into a massive attack on the right of intermediaries to publish truthful information.

Make no mistake — this is about much more than WikiLeaks. Shutting down sites like WikiLeaks is a very serious attack on freedom of expression.

In the United States, publishers have a fundamental right to print truthful political information. Equally important, Internet users have a fundamental right to read that information and voice their opinions about it. Throughout the world, these values are codified into the laws of many countries and are included in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Unfortunately, these values are only as strong as the will to support them. When individuals or companies choose to turn their backs on protected speech, we all lose. The key to participatory government is an educated electorate.

We're already seeing the backlash from recent events. Governments around the world are proposing laws that would severely limit our right to free expression. In the United States, lawmakers have rashly proposed a law that would threaten many news reporting agencies. Sadly, we expect to see similar efforts in other countries over the coming weeks and months.

Now is the time to stand up for your rights. Join EFF and stand up against Internet censorship. Here are some things you can do now to show that you care:

Download EFF's No Censorship button to your website and to your social networking campaign.

Replace your social networking avatars with EFF's No Censorship graphic.

Related Updates

Several journalists and experts have recently focused on the fact that a scanned document published by The Intercept contained tiny yellow dots produced by a Xerox DocuColor printer. Those dots allow the document's origin and date of printing to be ascertained, which could have played a role in...

Several journalists and experts have recently focused on the fact that a scanned document published by The Intercept contained tiny yellow dots produced by a Xerox DocuColor printer. Those dots allow the document's origin and date of printing to be ascertained, which could have played a role in...

For governments interested in suppressing information online, the old methods of direct censorship are getting less and less effective. Over the past month, the Thai government has made escalating attempts to suppress critical information online. In the last week, faced with an embarrassing video of the Thai King, the...

Facebook has blocked users in Thailand from accessing a video that shows the country’s king strolling through a German shopping mall wearing a crop-top revealing his distinctive tattoos, accompanied by one of his mistresses. Gennie Gebhart, a researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says Facebook is in a difficult...

In 2015, following years of dedicated activism – including individual actions by millions of Internet users – Team Internet scored a crucial victory: clear, enforceable protections for net neutrality. The new head of the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) wants to take away those protections and allow broadband providers...

KUNR: What kind of challenges to the First Amendment are you seeing in your work as a lawyer specializing in free speech protections? Greene: We see a lot of things. There’s still of lot of classic cases of civil lawsuits between people based on online speech. We’re also very involved...

Draft bills in at least 13 state legislatures would require all internet-enabled devices to come installed with an anti-porn filter, which adult consumers could choose to have removed for a fee of $20. But of course it's not only monetary costs to consumers that are are a concern. The porn-filter...

A bad review on Yelp is an anathema to a business. No one wants to get trashed online. But the First Amendment protects both the reviewer’s opinion and Yelp’s right to publish it. A California appeals court ran roughshod over the First Amendment when it ordered Yelp to comply with...

The US government has backed down from its attempt to unmask an anonymous Twitter account that criticized the Trump administration, a victory for free speech advocates. Jamie Lee Williams, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “The fact that they withdrew the summons...

Twitter dropped its legal fight with the federal government Friday after U.S. Customs and Border Protection reversed course and withdrew a summons seeking to unmask the users of an account critical of the Trump administration. "Once there’s push back and legal rights are asserted, then those things typically go away...